[trash_cat]

What constitutes real "thinking" or "reasoning" is beside the point. What matters is what results we getting.

And the challenge is rethinking how we do work, connecting all the data sources for agents to run and perform work over the various sources that we perform work. That will take ages. Not to mention having the controls in place to make that the "thinking" was correct in the end.

[virgil_disgr4ce]

Thinking is not besides the point, it is the entire point.

You seem to be defining "thinking" as an interchangeable black box, and as long as something fits that slot and "gets results", it's fine.

But it's the code-writing that's the interchangeable black box, not the thinking. The actual work of software development is not writing code, it's solving problems.

With a problem-space-navigation model, I'd agree that there are different strategies that can find a path from A to B, and what we call cognition is one way (more like a collection of techniques) to find a path. I mean, you can in principle brute-force this until you get the desired result.

But that's not the only thing that thinking does. Thinking responds to changing constraints, unexpected effects, new information, and shifting requirements. Thinking observes its own outputs and its own actions. Thinking uses underlying models to reason from first principles. These strategies are domain-independent, too.

And that's not even addressing all the other work involved in reality: deciding what the product should do when the design is underspecified. Asking the client/manager/etc what they want it to do in cases X, Y and Z. Offering suggestions and proposals and explaining tradeoffs.

Now I imagine there could be some other processes we haven't conceived of that can do these things but do them differently than human brains do. But if there were we'd probably just still call it 'thinking.'

[neutronicus]

> connecting all the data sources for agents to run

Copilot can't jump to definition in Visual Studio.

Anthropic got a lot of mileage out of teaching Claude to grep, but LLM agents are a complete dead-end for my code-base until they can use the semantic search tools that actually work on our code-base and hook into the docs for our expensive proprietary dependencies.